FORA V to declare a general strike (the FORA IX declared its solidarity with the dead but declined to stop work). Barricades rapidly went up across the capital and workers sacked grocery stores and distributed goods to the populace. The Vasena works, trolleys, and police vehicles were torched as a clash broke out between the people in arms on one side and the police and nationalist gangs on the other—though these events are often spoken of for the bloodiness of the repression, they also represented a moment in which the Argentine labor movement attempted to assert itself and directly create an anarchist society through popular revolts. The government required a full military mobilization to regain control of the situation and, as the events described in this book show, the political situation would remain volatile for years to come.
Once the army restored order—at the cost of an estimated seven hundred lives—gangs of rich and middle class Argentines organized a pogrom, taking out their anger at the strikers on the Jewish community of Buenos Aires.10 This pogrom—the so-called Tragic Week—also marked the rise of Argentina’s nationalist movement, a proto-fascist political tendency that sought to expel immigrants, end collective bargaining, and overthrow the democratically elected government. On January 15th, 1919, Rear Admiral Manuel Domecq García—who had armed and organized the “civilian volunteers” responsible for the pogrom—announced the formation of the Argentine Patriotic League, whose goal it would be to repress future outbreaks of working class unrest.11 Attracting military officers, policemen, large landowners, and right-wing intellectuals to its cause, the Patriotic League quickly became one of the most prominent nationalist organizations in Argentina and worked hand-in-glove with the police to violently break strikes across Argentina, but most infamously in Buenos Aires, La Palma, La Forestal, Villaguay, Gualuaychú, and Patagonia—where anarchists affiliated with the FORA V led a strike that ended in one of the worst massacres in Latin American history.
Though born in the heat of the immediate postwar political struggles, the nationalist movement would outlast its anarchist and Radical opponents to become the single most important tendency in twentieth-century Argentine politics. During the early years of the movement, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, and anti-democratic ideas surged in popularity, while Mussolini, Hitler, and Charles Maurras became heroes of the Argentine right. “Let my compatriots—be they Radicals, conservatives or progressive liberals—put their hand in the fire if they did not make Mussolini’s slogan ‘Rome or Moscow’ their own in those years,” wrote the nationalist intellectual Juan Carulla in 1951.12 By 1924, Leopoldo Lugones—Argentina’s greatest modernist writer and once a man of the left—had embraced the far right, calling on Argentina to follow the example of Italy. In his infamous “Ayacucho Address” (so-called because it was delivered on the centennial of the Battle of Ayacucho, which secured the independence of South America), Lugones lamented the loss of what he considered to be the nobility and heroism of the Wars of Independence and suggested that violence could restore an aristocratic order in Argentina: “Just as the sword has accomplished our only real achievement to date, which is to say, our independence, it will likewise now create the order that we need,” he said. “It will implement that indispensable hierarchy that democracy has to this date ruined—which it has in fact fatally derailed, for the natural consequence of democracy is to drift toward demagogy or socialism.”13
Lugones’s proclamation of the “hour of the sword” would have to wait six more years, however, as the prosperity of the mid-1920s and the relative conservatism of the Alvear administration slowed down nationalist organizing. But when Yrigoyen returned to the Casa Rosada in 1928 and the bottom fell out of the world economy the following year, all the conditions were in place for a military coup. On September 6th, 1930, troops led by General José Félix Uriburu—and was accompanied by two nationalist organizations, the Republican League and the League of May—forced Yrigoyen from office and instituted a military dictatorship.14 Once in power, General Uriburu attempted to create a corporatist state, although political opposition and his own declining health forced him to step down prematurely, deferring this dream until Juan Perón’s rise to power a decade and a half later. Incidentally, the FORA IX’s successor organization, the Argentine Syndical Union (USA), would participate in the 1945 general strike that secured Perón’s release from prison and his ascension to the presidency one year later. The union then dissolved itself and joined the Peronist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), closing out a cycle in which the “pure syndicalist” wing of the labor movement joined the state forces that continued to brutally murder and repress their former comrades.
Following the 1930 coup, many of Argentina’s anarchists went into exile in neighboring South American countries, many of which had militant anarchist movements of their own—there would be anarcho-communist revolts in Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia up through the 1940s, including the 1931 declaration of a revolutionary commune in the Paraguayan city of Encarnación.15 With the establishment of the Second Republic in 1931, many FORA members—including Diego Abad de Santillán and Simón Radowitzky, who both make cameo appearances in Rebellion in Patagonia—made their way to Spain. Members of the FORA and Uruguay’s FORU played an important role in the following years, both in the international debates surrounding the CNT as well as in the civil war itself. And though decimated by repression—Diego Abad de Santillán estimated that, after three decades of FORA activity, over five thousand militants were killed and over 500,000 years in prison sentences were handed out—the union was able to survive under Argentina’s succession of military regimes, maintaining a workplace presence until the last military dictatorship in the 1970s.16
But by the second half of the twentieth century, when Osvaldo Bayer wrote Rebellion in Patagonia, much of this history had been forgotten by the general public and Argentina’s once-vital anarchist movement had become a shadow of its former self, having largely been sidelined by Marxism and Peronism. Due to Patagonia’s distance from Buenos Aires, the 1920–1922 strike wave and subsequent massacre were particularly shrouded in mystery. Bayer himself heard about the events in Patagonia for the first time from his parents, who lived two blocks from the Río Gallegos jail during the repression that followed the strike. They told him that, late at night, they could hear the screams of the strikers being tortured by the prison guards—“My father was never able to overcome the sadness the deaths of all those people caused him,” Bayer would later say.17 Inspired by his father’s stories of the strike, Bayer moved to Patagonia in 1958 and founded La Chispa, billed as Patagonia’s first independent newspaper. In its pages, he defended the region’s workers and indigenous people, but was run out of Patagonia by gendarmes in 1959. In the early 1970s—after abandoning journalism to reinvent himself as an anarchist historian, writing acclaimed books and articles on figures such as Simón Radowitzky and the infamous insurrectionist Severino di Giovanni—Bayer returned to the south to track down the remaining survivors of the massacre. His research would result in his magnum opus, the four-volume The Avengers of Tragic Patagonia, later abridged as Rebellion in Patagonia. The first volume was a bestseller and film director Héctor Olivera approached Bayer to make a movie based on the books. And that’s when the trouble began.
Here it’s worth giving some background on the political situation in Argentina at the time. In 1973, Juan Perón returned to Argentina after nearly twenty years in exile and retook the presidency months later. Though many on the left fondly remembered the pro-labor policies of his first two presidential terms (1946–1952 and 1952–1955), Perón merely represented the left wing of the nationalist movement that had massacred Argentina’s genuine left in the early twentieth century and his support for unions was merely a means towards his ultimate end of creating a corporatist state modeled on Mussolini’s Italy. Any hopes that his return from exile would benefit the left were dashed the day his plane touched down—as Peronists gathered to greet their leader at the Ezeiza International Airport, snipers associated with the right wing of the movement opened fire on the crowd, killing at least thirteen people and wounding some three hundred more. Once in office, Perón fully backed the Peronist right, giving paramilitary organizations a free hand to liquidate Argentina’s independent left. When he passed away less than a year later, the presidency passed to his wife Isabel, who only intensified the persecution of the left.
On October 12th, 1974, Isabel Perón censored the film
